Sun Tzu's Golden Key to Success

Do you feel that you could excel if others gave you the opportunity? Or, worse, do you feel like you don't have any opportunities? Your opportunities are real. The secret is seeing them. The way to change your life is to start seeing your situation from a different angle. 

Competition is not a fight. It is a comparison. Every day we are compared to others. Your success depends on how other people see you. Every day, you compare your options to make decisions. The result of those decisions determine the course of your life. 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu identified how those competitive comparisons are made. He then developed a system for consistently improving your relative position when compared to others.

This system of Golden Key Strategy enables you to make better, faster, decisions every day.  Read more about Sun Tzu's unique view of competition here.

Today's Article: 8.7 Productivity Improvement - The seven keys to improving internal production to support external competition.

Our strategic positions have both an inside and an outside. The outside is the surface where our position makes contact with the competitive environment, the realm of strategy. The inside is our span of control, the realm of planning. Through planning and organization, we are able to improve our internal systems and make ourselves more productive within our span of control. The problem is that internal systems take on a life of their own. This problem only gets worse when strategic positions are successful, growing and...

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Recent Questions and Answers

Business Decisions

Question:
What are the three most important questions to ask yourself when making a business decision?
Answer:

There are two categories of business decision, which require sets of questions:

  • Management decisions, regarding the part of your organization’s resources that you can directly control
  • Strategic decisions, regarding your position within the larger competitive environment, which you cannot control directly

Within the management realm, you ask:

  1. How does it affect product quality?
  2. How does it affect product cost?
  3. How does it affect operation efficiency?

Within the competitive realm you ask:

  1. What is my position relative to the competition in the...
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Discover Your Own Power

Sun Tzu teaches that winning required avoiding costly conflict, but it requires more than that. Our success depends on our individual decision-making in interacting with other people. These decisions depend on our training. Sadly, we are all educated to work with inanimate objects. However, your success requires working with other people in productive ways. However, because of our lack of training, most of us fall back upon our instinctual "fight or flight" response when we are faced with interpersonal challenges. These instincts lead to destructive instead of productive decisions. Sun Tzu taught a new way for us to see competition by seeing the opportunities all around us to win the support of others. Read more about Sun Tzu's approach to creating personal power in this article. 

Easy Steps to Making Winning Choices


As Sun Tzu said, competition is complex but good strategy is a simple matter of learning to make the right comparisons. People are usually surprised by how many powerful tools his Golden Key approach offers, but its most basic tools are immediately valuable.  We offer a simple road map to get you started. The sooner you start on the road to making winning decisions, the faster you can improve your position. 
Read more about taking your first steps.

Nine Formulas: Nine Uncommon Skills.

Sun Tzu's system of making the right choices depends on knowing how to make simple comparisons. Successful people are not gifted from birth. They are ordinary people who developed a very specific set of skills. Most develop these skills through costly trial and error. Success requires a least a little skill in nine different areas of making the right comparisons and the right choices. Read more about these nine skills.

Keys to Sun Tzu's The Art of War


Sun Tzu's book is one of the most valuable works in human history. It is also one of the most difficult to understand. All English translations are an approximation of the original Chinese, which is more like mathematical formulas that English sentences. Much of Sun Tzu's writing is based on concepts in traditional Chinese science and philosophy with which modern readers are unfamiliar.  Read more about the keys to Sun Tzu.

Golden Key Strategy and Tactics

There are dozens of schools of strategy. Most ideas of strategy are rather academic, designed to sell consulting. For Sun Tzu, the process of making decisions that affect positions, that is, choosing responses to a competitive situations, is the heart of strategy.  The methods for executing a given response are the whole of tactics. The "golden key" of strategy is weighing alternatives correctly. Read more about the key differences between strategy and tactics.

Situation Specific: Sun Tzu's Playbook.


A great deal of Sun Tzu's work is situation specific. Since we only remember 5% of what we read, the problem is that a given lesson is easily ignored or forgotten because it doesn't apply to your current situation. Sun Tzu's Art of War Playbook breaks down Sun Tzu's methods into very situation specific lessons. As the result of over a decade of work, it details Sun Tzu's system of strategy into a series of step-by-step articles. Each article explores the opportunities hidden in different situations. It was developed over the years by the Institute's multiple award-winning author and founder, Gary Gagliardi from his work training leaders in the world's largest organizations. Read more about the PlayBook.

Surviving 2,500 Years of Testing.


Throughout history, people have rediscovered the same success principles over and over again. Sun Tzu was the first to describe them in his The Art of War, but the same formulas for making decisions are described in slightly different terms in every competitive arena from sports to politics. This "Golden Key" Strategy is universal because it is based on human nature and our response to challenges. Read more about how it works.

The Art of War and Mistranslation


No book written in the conceptual ancient Chinese can be completely translated into English prose. Most translations are based on manuscripts that are now considered incomplete. The translators usually are familiar with modern Chinese rather than ancient Chinese. Few translators understand the system of Chinese philosophy that underlies its system.  Read more about translation problems here.

Globalization and a More Competitive World


Competition is now worldwide. This means that people all over the wolrd are being compared to one another. In the past, people could plan on staying with the same organizations for a lifetime, so they  didn't worry about their competitive position every day. That world is gone forever. Today, we have to constantly evaluate our position in the workforce and make smarter decisions about how to improve our position. Read more about why today's world requires Sun Tzu's thinking.

Are You a Worker or Warrior?

Warriors make decisions. Workers follow orders. Warriors see every task as a personal challenge. Workers put themselves at the mercy of others. Warriors get what they deserve. Workers get what they are given. In today's world, warriors are in demand everywhere. Workers are available everywhere. Worker or Warrior? The choice is yours.  Read more about today's working warriors.

Train Your Brain

The Warrior Class offers 306 lessons in Sun Tzu's competitive methods. The course covers each paragraph of Sun Tzu's text from beginning to end. Each series of lessons is a game where you win or lose warrior health points. You must stay healthy to move to the next level. In each lesson, you make decisions about how competition works. After you make your choices, you learn the principles of Sun Tzu's The Art of War. 

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Learning By Doing

Warrior Class Lessons force you to make mistakes. By forcing you to make mistakes, they speed your learning and change your thinking. The simple truth is that we all learn many times faster from our mistakes. Read more about our methodology here.